Crowds appear lower at this year’s Navy Days as San Pedro looks to expand the event in the future

People take photos as they prepare to board for a tour of the USS Spruance, an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, which is docked in the Port of Los Angeles for Navy Days Aug. 09, 2014.
Steve McCrank — Staff photographer

In contrast to the 2011 event that flooded San Pedro with visitors, this year’s Navy Days seemed to attract fewer people than expected.

But attendance may grow again in the future as community leaders begin a push to get a designated Navy Fleet Week at the Port of Los Angeles, an enhanced event that would bring in more visiting ships and activities.

Scott Gray of the San Pedro Visitors Center, however, said that if the anticipated visitors were down, “it wasn’t by many.”

“We haven’t gotten a count yet, but it was steady,” said Gray whose organization provides volunteer services and visitor packages for the event.

The sense that not all of the expected visitors showed up, he said, may simply be because “the system worked so well.”

The good news: no rash of complaints about parking, traffic or lines.

“I haven’t heard of any glitches,” said Elise Swanson, president and CEO of the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce.

Some downtown businesses, such as Godmother’s bar, saw record business, thanks mostly to the ships’ crews of uniformed sailors.

Others said business was up but not by astounding numbers.

“Some days were very good, some were less attended,” said Andrew Silber, owner of the Whale & Ale Pub in downtown San Pedro. “It just didn’t materialize in terms of big numbers ... I can’t say it was disappointing, it was still a successful event. But we were prepared for huge crowds and we got medium-size crowds.”

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When news went out that all 7,000 passes had been snatched up online a few days before the event, some members of the public expressed disappointment, saying they’d hoped to attend.

No passes were available at the gate, a policy instituted after the 2011 event that brought tens of thousands of visitors into San Pedro to view visiting ships, including an aircraft carrier that year. Streets were clogged, parking lots full and ship tours had people waiting in line for hours.

Ivey said this year’s attendance numbers (Navy Days was not held in 2013 due to federal budget cuts) should be available by the end of this week and will help guide discussions for future planning.

New this year was a system in which ticket holders were able to spend much of the wait time inside the World Cruise Center baggage building, where educational video clips and information about the ships and Navy were available.

That meant wait times in the sun were down to about 20 minutes, Gray said.

Pending debriefing meetings to assess this year’s event, Ivey and others are discussing upping the ante next year with a full-fledged Fleet Week event similar to those in San Diego and San Francisco.

Fleet Weeks, held in major port cities throughout the country, feature participation by the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard, with guided ship tours, military demonstrations and air shows provided by groups such as the Blue Angels.

“We’ll try to make it even better next year,” Ivey said. “We’d like to move it to a fleet week status for more ships and more tours.”

That could mean the return of a high-profile aircraft carrier — bringing the discussion around again to managing crowds and traffic so the port town isn’t overwhelmed again because it has limited entry and exit streets.

“San Pedro doesn’t have the road infrastructure to handle all the traffic that was created in 2011,” Ivey said. “It just gridlocked the town.”

The Navy events are popular, he said, because of the area’s naval history, much of which is now gone.

Fleet Week, Gray said, “would entail a lot of different activities. We’d probably get more ships from the Navy and we’d have more activities to go along with it. ... The possibilities are endless.”

Gray believes the town could be ready for an expanded event and said he’s confident plans could be put in place to make it go smoothly, even with an aircraft carrier in the outer harbor.

“It could happen,” Gray said. “I think a lot of it will be the result of how organized we are here.”

And San Pedro seems to be getting plenty of practice in crowd and traffic management this summer.

Next week’s Tall Ships Festival is expected to attract some 330,000 people to the waterfront over the course of five days.